Self-taught, second profession, 38-years old, after just 1.5 years into my SWE career, lots of hard, deliberate work in an uncharted CI/CD space, and I've lande

Self-taught, second profession, 38-years old, after just 1.5 years into my SWE career, lots of hard, deliberate work in an uncharted CI/CD space, and I've landed a role as a Site Reliability Engineer for a major player in the health insurance data domain. 105k base salary, typical benefits package, in a medium-COL US region. This puts me well-ahead of what I thought were already pretty aggressive goals I had set for myself. The team I'm going to be working with looks like an excellent group of people, pleasant, hard-working, with an engineering-oriented mindset. I'll be working with a great set of technologies/infrastructure, applying interesting, useful techniques, and at a non-trivial scale. I'm pretty excited to be doing what I'm doing and making good money doing it. Big change from 2 years ago, where I was not excited to be doing what I was doing, and making not great money doing it. Quit drinking. Go to the gym. It can work wonders.